The scene is reported by the International Prison Observatory (OIP). An inmate is accused of violating prison discipline rules, which he denies. The disciplinary committee summons him to decide whether to sanction him. But due to confinement and sanitary rules, the prisoner is deprived of his lawyer. Only facing the commission headed by the director of the prison, the detainee is sent to solitary confinement.

This type of incident has become common since the start of containment. And the difficulties sometimes begin from the moment of police custody. Suspects are normally entitled to a lawyer, but since the coronavirus crisis they have been unable to attend.

"At the moment, it is not possible to assist our clients in police custody", explains to France 24 Me Muriel Ouaknine-Melki. "We have a videoconference system with certain police stations but it does not work everywhere. The client is still a little lonely while in police custody."

This situation can be repeated after police custody, when the suspect is brought before the prosecutor and then the judge to decide in particular whether he should be imprisoned. "Here too, it is very complicated because the videoconferencing system is not yet implemented everywhere. And so this type of debate still happens very often without a lawyer," explains Me Ouaknine-Melki. Many trials have been postponed. In other cases, the defense intervenes remotely and transmits the files by e-mail.

Lawyers are not the only legal professionals concerned about the situation. Judicial organizations also denounce it, alarmed in particular by the prolongation of provisional detentions without adversarial debate. In a press release issued on April 4, the Judicial Union estimates that by "automatically extending all pretrial detentions by several months, the Minister of Justice, Keeper of the Seals, causes our rule of law to falter even more".

A decrease in the prison population

The association of instructing magistrates asked Minister Nicole Belloubet to maintain contradictory debates even in time of confinement, by videoconference or in writing. The ministry ensures that the prolongations of detentions are perfectly legal and it defends the ordinance of March 25 which adapts the rules of penal procedure vis-a-vis the epidemic of Covid-19. In a press release, he said that the measures taken since the containment "preserve the rights of citizens" and "respect the essential guarantees".

"These decisions are legal from the moment the orders are made by the government. If you take an order that allows you to circumvent the law normally applicable, effectively, it becomes legal", explains Me Vincent Brengarth, from Bourdon & Associés , contacted by France 24. "One can wonder about the constitutionality of such measures, underlines the lawyer. To prolong the provisional detention without debate, it is new in recent legal history."

If the extension of pretrial detentions goes against the goal of reducing congestion in prisons because of the new coronavirus, the Ministry of Justice still notes a decrease in the prison population in recent weeks. According to him, a total of 6,266 detainees have left prison since the start of confinement. Contacted by France 24, Agnès Thibault-Lecuivre, spokesperson for the ministry, explains this drop by "the release of prisoners at the end of their sentence, the fact that there are fewer convictions and also the release of people who have not not convicted and are in pre-trial detention. "

Despite this decrease in the number of prisoners, the prison situation prevents the implementation of satisfactory sanitary measures to prevent or slow down the spread of the coronavirus. "There are two, three or even four detainees in a nine-square-meter cell, particularly in remand centers. Access to water and soap is complicated, hydroalcoholic gel is prohibited, the guards, who do not 'do not all have masks, carry out the searches with bare hands ", relates Cécile Marcel, director of the OIP, in an interview with France 24. And the overpopulation persists in French prisons since, according to the OIP, about 66 000 prisoners are now in French prisons, which have only 61,080 places.

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